The one disappointment is the lack of integration with any kind of Goodreads equivalent app.
I now use a combination of Storygraph and PastReads which is rather clunky.

We’ve got a new podcast!

Bad Services is out on the 20th of May, but if you can't wait to get stuck in, we’ve just launched a podcast so you can dive into the book early, and listen along as we talk about each chapter over the next few months.

good.services/badservicesp...

I switched to a Kobo Libra last year and love it. Biggest difference is that it’s focused on my books, and not constantly trying to sell me stuff.
I used Calibre to convert my Kindle library (bit of a faff), and have connected it to my library account to ‘borrow’ books.

Everything can be improved with maps.
Good work @colinstenning.bsky.social 👏

Government to lift paywall from large parts of the Land Registry Exclusive: finding out who owns land will become simpler under plans to make the best use of green spaces and hit net zero targets

VICTORY! Government to open up the Land Registry - bringing to an end a thousand years of secrecy shrouding who owns England.

I’ve been campaigning for this for ten years: the new Land Use Framework, published later today, makes it government policy. 1/

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

What went wrong with the BoM Redesign? A Post-Mortem on Judgement, Usability, and Redesign at Scale

Brilliant analysis of what went wrong with the expensive redesign of Australia's version of the met office app.

leisareichelt.substack.com/p/what-went-...

A green book that says Bad Services: How to fix services that don't work

Good Services came out 6 years ago and I am SO excited to finally announce that the Sequel - Bad Services - will be out in late May!

💯

Great article Will. From our experience starting up Local Gov Drupal, I’d say the first point would be “Identify impactful shared needs” - in public sector work there’s so much overlap and duplication, is actually hard NOT to do something that isn’t needed or hasn’t been done before by someone else!

Map showing 40,001 entries on our map.

We've hit FORTY-THOUSAND entries on openbenches.org 🥰

All contributed by people like you.

Thank you to all our wonderful supporters, brilliant photographers, and open source coders.

In September, I was asked to give some thoughts about the NHS 10-year plan based on some of the principles in Platformland. Here are the slides and speaker notes:

www.rpp.works/ways-of-d…

I feel your pain. Every aspect of the EHCP process feels like deceptive design to put off engagement.
But parents are stubborn buggers who care a lot about their kids.
You need next-gen resilience, good luck to you 🤞👍

The other good analogy (but more complex to visualise) is a restaurant - the user is focused on enjoying a meal, but there needs to be a building, staff, ingredients, fire safety, furniture, payments system, alcohol license, plates and cutlery, cold storage, gas and electric supplies etc.

Would something like this help? For users, they see a rope, but in government, a service is comprised of many different threads which may be visible to different extents.

All careers lead to tech.

(If you want them to)

"Fail fast" is not a viable approach to software construction. There's no benefit in constant failure. What we want to do is succeed fast. Do that with small batches and frequent corrections based on feedback. That's not "failure," it's just part of the process.
1/2

When Face Recognition Doesn’t Know Your Face Is a Face An estimated 100 million people live with facial differences. As face recognition tech becomes widespread, some say they’re getting blocked from accessing essential systems and services.

“There are few things more dehumanizing than being told by a machine that you’re not real because of your face"

For the last month, I've been speaking to people living with facial differences and disfigurements about how face verification tech is failing them. Spoiler: things aren't going well

Europe's largest city council delays fix to disastrous Oracle system once more System meant to go live in 2021 costing £20M awaits reimplementation with new £170M price tag Europe's largest local authority has delayed the introduction of a vital income management system (IMS) amid confirmation that total spending on a disastrous Oracle implementation could hit £170 million (c $230 million).…

Europe's largest city council delays fix to disastrous Oracle system once more

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon Are tech giants getting nervous? They should be Opinion  There tend to be three AI camps. 1) AI is the greatest thing since sliced bread and will transform the world. 2) AI is the spawn of the Devil and will destroy civilization as we know it. And 3) "Write an A-Level paper on the themes in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet."…

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

Trust

Day 1/30 sharing my favorite doodles and drawings.

Greatness Is Serving the real story behind Orient's newest mural: a picture of compassion, loyalty and gratitude

GREATNESS IS SERVING

Read the full story of a very special evening at Leyton's Coach & Horses, where some very special guests helped us tell the full story behind the fantastic new #LOFC mural - and all in a very deserving cause...

What checks? Some bsky.app/profile/f0p....

Microsoft admits it 'cannot guarantee' data sovereignty Under oath in French Senate, exec says it would be compelled – however unlikely – to pass local customer info to US admin Microsoft says it "cannot guarantee" data sovereignty to customers in France – and by implication the wider European Union – should the Trump administration demand access to customer information held on its servers.…

Microsoft admits it 'cannot guarantee' data sovereignty

At least you didn’t get covered in everyone’s beer when that equaliser went in!

Conspiracy theorists should be required to do work experience in government departments so they can see firsthand the impossibility of any vast secret government conspiracies.

Cheerleading is a team sport.

David R. Hagen just solved a small mystery that I mentioned 13 years ago in the mouseover text of a comic drhagen.com/blog/the-mis...

Extract: Using AI to unlock historic planning data This week, the Prime Minister officially launched Extract, the AI tool which the Digital Planning programme in MHCLG and the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence are developing to transform decades o...

Here’s some of the background on Extract, which the Prime Minister announced on Monday, plus the detail on how we incubated the proof-of-concept.

There’s boatloads more discovery and alpha work to do. Went full techno-realist with the open para. mhclgdigital.blog.gov.uk/2025/06/12/e...

Some helpful examples there, but it disappointingly tars health imaging with the same brush as language interpretation. AI use in cancer imaging has proven to be a success, finding cancers missed by doctors.

AI ≠ bad.

How the OS is bringing slopey roofs to homes near you The UK’s emissions targets are ambitious. The Ordnance Survey's new Slopey Roofs project may see them being met faster than suspected.

How the OS is bringing Slopey Roofs to homes near you

“… and combines it with findings from the Met Office, including information on the sun’s position at specific times and dates, to provide users with the Slopey Roofs tool for assessing the efficiency of roofs for solar panel installation.”